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Ok, so you probably heard that we are not doing the Hard Edge for Shopper. But the messages we have been getting are asking for more Alice and Bill.

Sooooo…. we figured we would try a free newsletter featuring items from our website and other rants and commentary. We may even do a subscriber version of The Hard Edge if there is enough interest out there, but in the meantime, why not sign up for our email newsletter and keep in touch with us? Tell your pals to sign up too and let’s get this party started.

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Legal eagle fine print: If we do end up doing a subscriber version of the Hard Edge, it won’t be called “The Hard Edge.” CNET acquired the rights to that name when it bought ZDNet, which included Computer Shopper. Maybe we’ll call it “The Hedge Yard” or something else, but it definitely will NOT be called “The Hard Edge.” So put down that phone, there’s no need to call the lawyers.

It may seem like a cell phone, it may look inviting enough to pick up and make a call with it. But don’t!! That’s no cell phone, it’s a 180,000 volt stun gun! Yes, a STUN GUN! Could this be the reason why 83 people out of some 100 million have experienced violent reactions from the supposed cell phones? Could some nefarious neighbor, friend, or (gasp!) relative have switched the victim’s poor harmless cell phone with this blazing beast of electrical bolts? If none of the incidents occurred in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, or Hawaii, where these deadly stun gun phones cannot be shipped, it’s quite probably the answer to Alice’s post below.

So, next time you stick something in your ear, look first and be sure it won’t end in a shocking encounter!

Reports are on the rise that cell phones can explode or burst into flames thanks to bad batteries and chargers. 83 reports have been filed in the past 2 years. Now, call me cynical, but 83 out of the millions of units on the market doesn’t sound like a real problem to me, but then again, I haven’t lost all my hair in a fireball while chatting.

According to AP Newswire, “Some consumer advocates say the cause goes beyond bad batteries making their way to the market. They point to the increasing pressure on battery and phone makers to fit more capabilities into small instruments. ‘If you’re cramming more and more power in a small space, what you’re making is a small bomb,’ said Carl Hilliard, president of the California-based Wireless Consumers Alliance, which has been tracking incidents of cell phone fires and explosions.

“Though legitimate batteries can go wrong, there is a greater chance that poorly made, counterfeit ones will lack safety devices to detect overheating or overcharging. The lithium-ion batteries found in most cell phones can overheat if, for example, heat vents are covered. The CPSC is trying to determine if improved venting is enough by itself to ensure safety. ‘We have seen temperatures as high as 600 degrees, and you can have a torch-like effect if these batteries don’t function properly,’ Wolfson said.

“Angela Karasek, a 21-year-old paralegal in Philadelphia, bought her Motorola phone and battery together from a Nextel store. She awoke one night a few weeks ago to what she described as a pinging sound and then saw fire. Her cell phone battery had blown out, igniting a doll about three feet away. She ran to her parents’ room for help, and her father quickly put out the fire.”

The one interesting thing about working online is just when you think you have seen it all, a curtain somewhere in cyberspace is pulled back and you learn how innocent and naive you really were. This month it happened twice.

First we learned of a Texas-based company offering real wildlife hunting over the internet, which we dubbed Hunting Over IP, but this week is truly twisted: a new video game called “JFK Reloaded” allows you to play assassin and take out JFK– winning points for having fired shots most similar to Oswald’s.

I have to say that coming from a video game background, nothing really offends me. I like shooting the monsters in DOOM and Quake, and love Half Life, and even running over people in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, but this one leaves me beyond cold. Maybe it’s the way it bills itself as a historical recreation, which may be true from the car and landscape perspective, but the premise is just sicko.

There was a wave of equally sick pro-Nazi concentration camp video games circling underground in Germany back in the 90’s, but no one has taken on an icon like Kennedy until now. Wired News did a piece that had this to say “The release of JFK Reloaded is timed to coincide with the 41st anniversary of Kennedy’s murder in Dallas and was designed to demonstrate that a lone gunman was able to kill the president. ‘It is despicable,’ said David Smith, a spokesman for Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, the late president’s brother. He was informed of the game on Friday but declined further comment. Kirk Ewing, managing director of the Scottish firm Traffic Games, which developed the game, said he understood some people would be horrified at the concept, but he insisted he and his team had nothing but respect for Kennedy and for history.”

Uh…thanks Kirk. With respect like that who needs enemies?

That’s the contention from a study done by Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann of the CESifo economic research organization in Munich using the test performance and background data from the 2000 PISA study involving tens of thousands of students in 31 countries. “Students who use computers a lot at school have worse maths and reading performance, research suggests. Those using computers several times a week performed “sizeably and statistically significantly worse” than those who used them less often.”

Don’t take their word for it. Alice’s old buddy, Prince Charles, last week said, “I simply do not believe that passion for subject or skill, combined with inspiring teaching, can be replaced by computer-driven modules, which seem to occupy a disproportionate amount of current practice.”

I’m guessing that HRH knows his stuff. If you track the admitted decline of education, you’ll probably notice that it follows along with the increase of technology in the classroom. If you’re about to say, “That doesn’t make any sense,” all I can reply is, “Hold on thar, Baba-louie!” The mind really is a terrible thing to waste and when you don’t exercise it properly it doesn’t work as well as it should. You need to be able visualize, conceptualize, envision… Technology does all of that for you, to a greater and greater degree as time goes by. Think about music videos. No, it’s not far-fetched. Before, when you listened to music, your mind created the images that the music evoked from it. Now, you’re channeled into a predefined visualization of the music’s theme. You’ve been basically taken out of the picture. Your mind becomes a receptor rather than an originator. As we are a lazy race by nature, the more often that happens, the more often we’ll expect it to happen, and the less we’re able to use our minds the way they were meant to be used.

Untrue speculation? If you’ve ever watched the “Jay Walking” segments on the Tonight Show or listened to Sean Hannity’s Thursday “Man on the Street” interviews, you probably already realize that something’s wrong.

What have all these studies been that claim the exact opposite, you wonder? Let the authors be your guide: “Fuchs and Woessmann found that the more computers there were in students’ homes, the better their test performance. But more computers went with more affluent, better-educated families. So they took this into account in the statistical analysis. In schools, they found students performed worse in those which reported a significant lack of computers. But again, once they took into account the schools’ general resources the same pattern emerged. That is, the initial positive pattern on computer availability at school simply reflects that schools with better computer availability also feature other positive school characteristics. Once these were taken into account, computer availability was not related to student performance.” Duh…

Believe it or don’t. It’s only the future.

But Can Your Inkjet Do This, Dept: Our pals over at Mavromatic, have an interesting piece on a new technology called “Pringles Prints” that uses food coloring to print images and text onto the wavy surface of a Pringle potato chip.

Guess, there is so much to be said, but I’ll just end with this - does anyone want the inevitable blue or red mouth that come from eating these chips and injesting the dye all in the name of on-food advertising?

“Launched this week, the World Community Grid will use idle computer time to test solutions to these problems. The donated processor cycles will help the WCG create virtual supercomputers via the net. The idea follows the success of other similar projects that have used the untapped processing power of millions of desktop PCs.”

If you go to read the story on the BBC news, take garlic, crosses, wooden stakes, and Holy water with you.

It took a lot of hard work to get to the point where I was skeptical enough about technology to be cynical. I’m proud of it. All this talk about satellite radio, for example, was very difficult to trust. Subscription radio? Well, having lived through the inception, acceptance, and popularity of Pay TV there’s only so much cynicism to spread around.

Both Sirius and XM offer three-day free trials. (Although I’m sure my e-mail will be layered with ads for years to come as a result of my registration.) Why not?

Here’s the deal, when I’m not listening to talk radio (and I don’t mean NPR), I like rock –classic, what I grew up with, rock and roll. Don’t give me “shock jocks.” IMO, they’re just cras people pandering to folk who never outgrew sophomore year of college. I don’t care about sports unless its NASCAR (although I’m not going to buy a Nextel phone and sign up for its NASCAR radio service); if there’s no harpsichord, don’t bother me with classical (OK, maybe the 1812 Overture, if done with canons…); just play me that good old time rock and roll. I’m tired of flipping through CDs (or 8-tracks, in the case of my ‘76 Camaro).

Both networks, thankfully, have Rock ‘n’ Roll channels. Excellent! XM breaks it down into a couple of decades, Sirius has a few flavors, one called “Classic Vinyl.” Sounds real.

There I sit, with my big hulky Extreme PC logged on to XM, listening over the Internet, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s…. Goawd! Can’t their DJs just shut up? I don’t want AM Rock Cousin Brucey Clones climbing over the intro to almost every song. I’d be paying for this!! Then there’s the music. Sure, there’s some rock in there, but the majority of the tunes are either Top 40 or just plain Easy Listening. (Which are sometimes one and the same anyway…)

Over on Sirius I dial up Classic Vinyl… No DJs…. Oops, spoke too soon. Apparently the DJs wake up about 10:00am EST. Well, at least he’s not obnoxious and annoying –yet. (Okay, some overtalk on the end of the music, but not a lot. It’s more like FM, at least where I am. Wait, he just walked over the intro to We’re an American Band. They need to learn, it’s not the DJs we want to hear.) The music? It’s rock, mostly! Jethro Tull… T. Rex… Hendrix… Led Zeppelin… How the hell did Steely Dan get in there with Rikki Don’t Lose That Number? Still, the mix looks to be greater than 6:1 and I can live with that. (Although, having lived it, I’m not sure I’d classify Dylan as rock. Must be young guys doing the programming.) And there’s only the occasional plug for the service. (Which makes no sense. I have a big Sirius LOGO on the screen. There’d be a logo on the radio, if I had one. Do they think I’m thinking I’m on XM? Maybe it’s an FCC requirement…)

So what does it mean to me? If I was to bite the big satellite bullet in the sky, and with apologies to Willie Nelson, I’d probably stick Sirius in the Camaro. (That’s a BIG concession. It means chopping an otherwise pristine dashboard for a Sirius-compatible receiver and then finding a place for the Sirius tuner. None of that portable crap. I don’t want to drive in an elevator and only TV is allowed in the LofD&PC.) Admittedly, I’ve only put in a couple of hours on each side, and even then it was for specific entertainment content, but I don’t understand how XM became so big and bad. Much as I have no affection for Howard Stern, as long as Sirius doesn’t try to reclone itself as XM, hopefully he and the soon to be newly arrived Mel Karmazin can do good things for the service.